It’s a long piece, and I recommend you read it all… but here are a few highlights for the less patient:

[…] the oft-heard claim that the death of a language means the death of a culture puts the cart before the horse. When the culture dies, naturally the language dies along with it. The reverse, however, is not necessarily true. Groups do not find themselves in the bizarre circumstance of having all of their traditional cultural accoutrements in hand only to find themselves incapable of indigenous expression because they no longer speak the corresponding language. Native American groups would bristle at the idea that they are no longer meaningfully “Indian” simply because they no longer speak their ancestral tongue. Note also the obvious and vibrant black American culture in the United States, among people who speak not Yoruba but English.

[…]

Obviously, the discomfort with English “taking over” is due to associations with imperialism, first on the part of the English and then, of course, the American behemoth. We cannot erase from our minds the unsavory aspects of history. Nor should we erase from our minds the fact that countless languages—such as most of the indigenous languages of North America and Australia—have become extinct not because of something as abstract and gradual as globalization, but because of violence, annexation, and cultural extermination. But we cannot change that history, nor is it currently conceivable how we could arrange for some other language to replace the growing universality of English. Like the QWERTY keyboard, this particular horse is out of the barn.

Even if the world’s currencies are someday tied to the renmimbi, English’s head start as the lingua franca of popular culture, scholarship, and international discourse would ensure its linguistic dominance. To change this situation would require a great many centuries, certainly too long a span to figure meaningfully in our assessment of the place of English in world communications in our present moment.

[…]

At the end of the day, language death is, ironically, a symptom of people coming together. Globalization means hitherto isolated peoples migrating and sharing space. For them to do so and still maintain distinct languages across generations happens only amidst unusually tenacious self-isolation—such as that of the Amish—or brutal segregation. (Jews did not speak Yiddish in order to revel in their diversity but because they lived in an apartheid society.) Crucially, it is black Americans, the Americans whose English is most distinct from that of the mainstream, who are the ones most likely to live separately from whites geographically and spiritually.

The alternative, it would seem, is indigenous groups left to live in isolation—complete with the maltreatment of women and lack of access to modern medicine and technology typical of such societies. Few could countenance this as morally justified, and attempts to find some happy medium in such cases are frustrated by the simple fact that such peoples, upon exposure to the West, tend to seek membership in it.

As we assess our linguistic future as a species, a basic question remains. Would it be inherently evil if there were not 6,000 spoken languages but one? We must consider the question in its pure, logical essence, apart from particular associations with English and its history. Notice, for example, how the discomfort with the prospect in itself eases when you imagine the world’s language being, say, Eyak.

Lots of food for thought there. I find myself wanting some sort of compromise between McWhorter’s suggestion and the stance of the preservationists, in that I think it would be good to support the speaking and learning of minor langauages by their originating ethnic group where practical, but that attempting to reinstate marginal languages as the official tongue of business and government in places where they have long been out of primacy is wasteful, despite being motivated by good intentions.

Let’s play devil’s advocate and look at the situation in Wales, for example, where all official communications and public discourse must be presented in both English and Welsh, but where the percentage of Welsh speakers continues its decline year by year. Isn’t that a bit like keeping a patient on life-support long after quality of life has declined to negligable levels? Would the money not be better spent on documenting and preserving the language as a historical entity than forcing its use by people who neither want or need it?

The logic of a single global language is probably what ensured its ubiquity in science fiction… but logic and emotion are uneasy bedfellows, especially in matters of global culture. What do you think – should be we be striving to keep languages alive, or letting them die with dignity?

5 Responses to “One world… one language?”

Do we really have that much control ? Language spreads along cultural influence. Diversity in language provides insight into social history and a wealth of interesting information about patterns of thought. But lowering the barriers to communication may be even more valuable. And anyway – when social groups form, they always form their own language too… So I’m not worried about languages dying and forming : it is the natural ebb and flow of cultures that manifests itself in this way.

Actually, there is an interesting compromise: EO+EN. It is proposed by the Declaration of International Communication, http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/intcom/ . For those who absolutely, positively don’t want to give English precedence, let them learn Esperanto. Long ago in college, I was asked: How would you like to be speaking another language fluently in 10 weeks? Yea, sure, I thought, while I was struggling with Russian. But I tried it. Truly, I was speaking Esperanto after 10 lessons. A very big problem is the difficulty of learning English when coming from a non-romance language. A very regular, easily mastered second language can surmount that problem.

If you were to extrapolate in a slightly longer term, you could imagine that the majority of languages will be protected from true extinction through technology, in the same way that there are gene banks for biological organisms. Since universal translation seems to be achievable fairly soon combined with the ever-expanding capabilities and reach of the internet, this opens the debate as to the need to protect cultural sovereignty at all. Cultures are mixing and merging and evolving in a new global culture that will contain and remix every single bit of information. Communication itself is bound to evolve in way we cannot even predict. In the past, cultural annihilation by a stronger force was total. This is not the case any longer, it a absorbed, integrated, and at the worst – archived for future use.

I think it is important that a diversity of languages be preserved because language effects they way that people think. Different languages allow for different ways of thinking and there may arise situations where the mode of thinking that English creates will not be the one that is needed.

I can’t see this happening – the English language doesn’t have words to describe certain things in other languages (and vice versa) – how will they fill these gaps?
Coming from a Korean background, there are plenty of Korean words that I can not easily convert to English – first things to come to mind are adjectives to describe food & its taste, quite strongly integrated to its culture… But the same applies in reverse, there are English words that I can’t translate to Korean without having a full sentence to describe 1 word…

Also, we don’t call elders/seniors by their first nor surname, and the word “brother” or “sister” is different depending on whether you’re male/female, and if they are older or younger than you – and you don’t call them by their name if older than you, but instead they’re “old brother” or “older sister” – I really can’t see these issues being resolved without completely changing a part of the culture.

sorry, really bored at work atm 😛

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